I have no strong opinions on this, honestly — it was an arbitrary limit dictated by earlier technology which spurred creative work-arounds, but the pure 140-character tweet (without pics, gifs or links) has been dead and gone for quite a while now. Some folks think this spells the end of the platform, but I doubt it.

More to the point is everything Twitter isn’t doing, changes users have been begging for a long time: better handling of abuse and hate speech, the removal of neo-nazis and white supremacists, protection from mobs of trolls and harassers.

Carlos Maza covers the complexities of protecting free speech on social media platforms in a recent Vox video.

I love how nihilistic this is. "More expression! More of what's happening! We've lost control of our platform! God is dead! Rejoice!" https://t.co/DM4srUnOQh

In light of these challenges (and Twitter’s inaction in rising to them with any coherent vision of what meaningful conversation might actually look like), bumping up the character limit to 280 seems largely irrelevant. What will we say in 280 characters that we haven’t learned to say in 140?

280

They loosened the corsetbut too late. Our organs,long since grown narrow, shook in the spacelike a rattle, makinga sicklynoise.

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/twice-as-much-of-whatever-weve-become/feed/0http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/twice-as-much-of-whatever-weve-become/Five New Poems: Evolving Gender and the Mask of Social Mediahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/KO8m_h0QqDI/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/five-new-poems-evolving-gender-and-the-mask-of-social-media/#commentsThu, 26 Oct 2017 18:53:38 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4807was it?), a curiously thematic bunch of my poems all were accepted for publication during the month of October. ]]>Masks are everywhere these days… and not just because Halloween is just around the corner. Sometimes we don’t even realize the masks that we’ve been wearing — the patterns and themes and synchronicities that have been lurking behind the mask of random chance in our lives — until someone else points them out to us.

That’s sort of what happened to me when, by sheer coincidence (or was it?), a curiously thematic bunch of my poems all were accepted for publication during the month of October. Five poems, written over the span of a decade, accepted by three different journals. I didn’t even realize they had anything much in common until I sat down to write up this little blurb — and then suddenly it was staring me in the face!

“Mask,” by Alison Leigh Lilly, published by Raw Dog Press (Oct 2017)

Each of these poems grapples with the liminal — the boundary between inside and outside — essence and appearance — and how we navigate, negotiate, construct, deconstruct, interpret and re-imagine those edges as part of the on-going processes of exploring self-identity.

My poem “Mask” (above) is featured as this month’s Post Poem by Raw Dog Press, an independent publisher since 1972 specializing in post card poetry and chapbooks.

Each of us comes from the union of a man and a woman, but, by definition, the DNA of conception provides a spiral staircase of genetic evolution, an intermixing of male and female characteristics. In her introduction to the 1976 paperback edition of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that human “psychological reality” can be “androgynous” “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers” and she concludes that “truth is a matter of imagination.” In other words, in recent years society has allowed individuals, mayhap grudgingly, the right to express the inner lives they imagine to be true.

You can read more about this theme in her Editor’s Note. (Also, don’t forget to check out the other contributing poets in this fascinating issue!)

More light-hearted, these three poems shift focus from the performance of gender to the performance (often playful, always double-edged and two-faced) of self-identity more broadly speaking in the strange and wild environs of social media. They poke (and poke fun) at the ways in which our public personas conceal just as much as they reveal. What are the choices we continually make about what we want our “outsides” and “insides” to look like, and who gets to decide which is which?

I hope you’ll check them out! And, as always, if you enjoy them, please support the arts and artists by sharing the love! Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below, or hit me up on — you guessed it — social media! (Mostly on Twitter these days, @alileighlilly.)

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/five-new-poems-evolving-gender-and-the-mask-of-social-media/feed/1http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/five-new-poems-evolving-gender-and-the-mask-of-social-media/New Poems: Reclaiming the “Tweet” as Modern Haikuhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/ICQ38uAl_mc/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/new-poems-reclaiming-the-tweet-as-modern-haiku/#respondThu, 19 Oct 2017 21:52:40 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4800October has turned out to be a pretty busy month for me, publication-wise! I’ve been putting off writing a quick update post for you all, since I don’t want to spam your news feeds and inboxes every time a new piece comes out… but at this point, the procrastination is getting a little bit silly! So for now, here are just a few of my latest poems (with more to come next week, so be sure to swing by and check those out, too!)…

I wanted to group these poems together for a reason, though they’ve appeared in a few different literary journals. They’re all in a poetic form that I’ve been working in recently and that I’ve come to think of as a kind of millennial-haiku (or, for pun-related reasons, I sometimes call a “byte poem”).

Robin's nest, unused all summer, filling with rain & the first gold, tear-drop leaves of a new season. I could stand under this sky forever.

Most Westerns know the haiku as a particularly powerful, condensed form of literary poetry that evokes a Zen-like simplicity in its imagery and language. But before Matsuo Basho, the hands-down greatest haiku poet in history and the man who essentially defined haiku as we now understand it, this poetic form was very different. For hundreds of years before Basho revolutionized the form in the 17th century, the writing of these little poems was basically a party game — a chance for a gathering of poets to show off their wit and word-play by creating long collaborative linked poems (known as renga), often while consuming more than a little sake along the way. The party’s host had the honor of kicking off the game with a three-line verse (called a hokku) to serve as the opening stanza, and would strive to make their opening verse especially striking, provocative and impressive. Eventually these short verses were circulated, read and enjoyed as standalone pieces, and their name was changed from hokku (meaning “presenting verse”) to haiku (“playful verse”).

Then, Basho came along and completely transformed the genre. These days, if you want to write incredibly-short verse and you want even a hope of getting them published in a literary journal, haiku is still your go-to form. Ginsberg took a stab at inventing his own short-form poetic style, called the “American sentence” — a single sentence of seventeen syllables, basically a haiku without line breaks. There are entire literary magazines dedicated to publishing only haiku and American sentences.

Meanwhile, though, something else was going on in American culture: someone created the internet, and someone invented the smart phone, and lo, the Information Age was born. The Age of the Tweet. While literary journals have continued to privilege haiku and American sentences as the very best of short-form poetry, our own homegrown organic short-form poetry party-game was evolving right in our pockets. The 140-character tweet, and the increasingly popular multi-tweet thread, are modern-day American reinventions of the renga and hokku/haiku of Japan — sometimes written by a single person, sometimes a collaborative pile-up of snarky comments, witty retorts and scathing satire snowballing in real-time with the help of catchy hashtags. What began as a fun way to communicate with friends has evolved into a public platform where, in only 140 characters, someone can say something that might change the world.

Enter: the Twit in Chief, who stepped into the Oval Office last November and refused to put down his phone. Now, there is a man who can feed Russian trolls, insult veterans, stoke racial tensions, denigrate women and even potentially start a nuclear war… all in only 140 characters.

As a poet, I find myself both horrified and awed by this demonstrable power of the written word. I wrote recently in a cover letter to Mary-Jane Grandinetti, editor of Shot Glass Journal:

I’ve found myself driven to reclaim the “tweet” medium as a place of power, to re-tune my language so that I might enter into that space and push it as far as I can, push it until it breaks open from the inside.

That is why, since last fall, I’ve been working more and more in the “byte poem” form: 140 characters, short enough to tweet. So far, only a few have been published — in 7×20 this past June, and now this month in Shot Glass Journal and Cuento Magazine.

Not that I claim to be a Basho, or even a Ginsberg, but I hope that, like the haiku, someday the tweet will be remembered for its potential to provoke, to surprise and to transform the world as we know it.

EQUINOX

The hard-ambered sunteeters on its edge, a darkbit of vein flaked away,gnawed to lace,the horizon line jaggedwith first frost.

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/new-poems-reclaiming-the-tweet-as-modern-haiku/feed/0http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/new-poems-reclaiming-the-tweet-as-modern-haiku/New Poem: Abstractedhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/wHysGKT31nc/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/new-poem-abstracted/#commentsWed, 20 Sep 2017 19:10:46 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4790Third Point Press, a literary journal that hails from my very own hometown of Lancaster, PA. (There's an extra special thrill in getting published somewhere that even your mom has heard of!) Check out my piece, "Abstracted."]]>I can’t tell you how honored I am to be included among a handful of amazing writers and artists in the most recent issue of Third Point Press, a literary journal that hails from my very own hometown of Lancaster, PA. (There’s an extra special thrill in getting published somewhere that even your mom has heard of!) Check out my piece, “Abstracted.”

I wonder what Jung would have
to say about it, how for years now
we have saturated the collective
unconscious with stories of war,

collusion and incest, machinations
of political corruption, moral sickness
among the rich, while fire and ice
loomed, denied, debated. And now—

I know all the names of the players,
though I’ve never read the books
or seen the show, and I’ve heard
so many times the reasons why

it’s brilliant, the best, the most
throned of all the games, but
I have to admit, I’ve never heard
a single thing that made me want

to watch. Why spend time with
such monsters? Are we so bored
with singing love songs, playing
games of chance and skill where

no one dies? What makes us
think these stories can tell us
who we are? Violence leads on
to violence, and love to love.

I miss the days when we dreamed
of nameless striders in the wild,
gray-robed wizards, unimportant men
carrying the world up the mountain,

slowly, step by step, sunlight falling
on the stone heads of fallen kings,
reminding us that stories shape
the wilder, better life we long to live.

And remember, how he finally smiled
when he stepped onto the boat
at the very end, so ready to move
on to the Land of Valar across the sea

—or maybe it was Hawaii, sunny
and warm and full of waves,
where he went water-skiing every day
like a laughing metaphor for grace.

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/i-blame-trump-on-game-of-thrones/feed/1http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/i-blame-trump-on-game-of-thrones/Dear Editor: A Poem in Four Tweetshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/oG8LoCB0vJU/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dear-editor-a-poem-in-four-tweets/#respondThu, 13 Jul 2017 17:53:46 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4765Are you okay?I only ask becauseyour selections of latehave gone rather grim.Not an ode to joyamong them,not one kiss.]]>

Dear Editor,Are you okay?I only ask becauseyour selections of latehave gone rather grim.Not an ode to joyamong them,not one kiss.

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dear-editor-a-poem-in-four-tweets/feed/0http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dear-editor-a-poem-in-four-tweets/Dreamy, But Brief: two poemshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/rZi2HrrQpmE/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dreamy-but-brief-two-poems/#respondFri, 30 Jun 2017 17:55:02 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4749Seven By Twenty, a literary magazine dedicated to pushing the edge of brevity with very-very-very-short fiction and poetry in less than 140 characters.]]>Excited to share my latest publication with you guys! Two prose poems published with the awesome online journal Seven By Twenty, a literary magazine dedicated to pushing the edge of brevity with very-very-very-short fiction and poetry in less than 140 characters.

Check out my poems below! (And, you know, *heart* and RT if you like ;)

Dream: A few drops on the tongue, the tender bodies who smell of sweat, and a slow dawn's heat that seals the way between memory and waking.

Check out Seven By Twenty for more cool micro-fiction and poetry (I particularly enjoy their speculative and magical realism). You can find them on Twitter at @7×20 and follow their blog here. Also check out their anthology of previously published pieces (whew! alliteration is fun!) from Upper Rubber Boot Books, 140 And Counting.

]]>http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dreamy-but-brief-two-poems/feed/0http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/dreamy-but-brief-two-poems/Natural Wonderhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/meadowsweet-myrrh/~3/mFUA55bMdGU/
http://alisonleighlilly.com/blog/2017/natural-wonder/#respondWed, 07 Jun 2017 17:03:51 +0000http://alisonleighlilly.com/?p=4742Last week, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord. This poem is not about that.

Natural Wonder

In Morocco, the researchers confirmed,
hungry goats will climb into an argan tree
when they can’t find fruit at their feet
— clamber up and chow down,
ruminate a while, then spit the seed.
This is how it goes, what they call
dispersal, succession, the architecture
of regeneration: the corrosive juices of
the stomach, the bleating laughter, breaking
open and discarding what could not
otherwise long survive in an arid world —
first in the wild, then later, on YouTube.

Petrarch had his Laura,
a phoenix feather for his pen.
Danté’s blessed Beatrice
sent him to hell and back again.
Rilke’s heart-sick panther.
Burns’ wee tim’rous beastie.
None tremble with the thrill I feel
whenever you retweet me.

If my listicles are funny
and my clickbait off the hook,
I know I’m getting through to you
when you like me on Facebook.
They used to call it courtly love,
a bard’s devotion to his muse.
The give and take of glances.
The re-blogs and reviews.

I seduce you with my humor,
I secure you with my wit.
I’m your chaste friendzone beloved.
You’re my one millionth hit.
My every headline is a soul-song,
like a ribbon from my hair
that you proudly wear to battle
as a #hashtag that you care.

But what terrifying angel
draws close to the sublime
— I’d never want to meet you —
it’s much safer here online
where you are just a stranger
and you don’t know who I am,
just the vintage version of myself
I share on Instagram.

Still I try to live the questions
like every question is a meme,
and the memes are in a foreign tongue
quoting shows I’ve never seen.
But my image in your Tumblr
seems to scroll so quickly by,
like how for the greatest poets,
the best muses always die.

So I wander back to Petrarch
and his flame-like quill and ink.
(If you don’t get all these references,
you can Google them, I think.)
Or like Rilke and his panther,
hungry for a change of scene
beyond these ones and zeros
in my heart and on the screen.